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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27882874">(but it hasn't happened yet)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalSpaceDragon/pseuds/MagicalSpaceDragon'>MagicalSpaceDragon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Ghosts, POV Second Person, Suicidal Thoughts, The Alternate Lost Light</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:28:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,417</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27882874</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalSpaceDragon/pseuds/MagicalSpaceDragon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Drift gives you a Spectralist funeral.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Drift | Deadlock &amp; Hot Rod, Drift | Deadlock &amp; Rodimus | Rodimus Prime</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>40</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>(but it hasn't happened yet)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>"space can you write something besides angsty rodimus-centric post-LL25 fic" and another finger on the monkey's paw curls inward</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Dying feels familiar. Waking up after dying also feels familiar.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Of course, last time when you woke up it was because you'd gotten a new lease on life, courtesy of the Matrix. You think you've gotten a second one for all of a moment before you realize that Drift's not looking at you, but </span>
  <em>
    <span>through</span>
  </em>
  <span> you. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You turn around. Your arms and head tingle in sympathy as you stare at the body, lodged halfway through the engine and graying. You barely recognize it from this angle.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>"Oh," you say, and the engine room explodes into noise.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>Drift gives you a Spectralist funeral.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The coffin makes you twitchy. The wasting perfectly good parts makes you twitchier. You would have guessed that sticking around as a ghost would make you want to keep your body all to yourself, but instead you're clawing at Drift's arm begging him to reuse you, pass your parts on to whoever needs repairs, just let you be good for </span>
  <em>
    <span>something.</span>
  </em>
  <span> You've done so little that ever helped anybody. The search for the Knights was supposed to be your </span>
  <em>
    <span>legacy,</span>
  </em>
  <span> and now you're—</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>"Please," you beg. "Please, Drift, don't just throw me out, </span>
  <em>
    <span>please—"</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Drift doesn't hear you.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The funeral itself is nice, though. Drift's been talking to you about Spectralism a lot lately, and it's… You've felt edgy, a little bit, about Drift trying to convert you, but the thing is that all the scrap he says during the ceremony </span>
  <em>
    <span>resonates,</span>
  </em>
  <span> and you regret not listening better when you had the chance. Maybe Drift will try converting someone else, and you'll be able to tag along. Is that allowed? Converting after you're dead?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Well, Primus isn't exactly hanging around being a useful source of exposition right now, so you're gonna say it's allowed.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>Drift comes clean about Overlord. You watch the crew's reactions—watch Drift's face as he explains, words nowhere near like the ones he said to you before the launch now that he doesn't have to smile and bend to all of his idiot captain's horrible, stupid, selfish whims—and wish you were deader.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He told you, once, when you were still going by a different name, about all the friends he's watched die. You'd laid there with him on the floor of your shared habsuite, gripping his hands in yours, and promised that you had a habit of surviving. That it'd take a hell of a lot to kill you, and that you didn't have any intention of going quickly or quietly or easily.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There's only so much of the crew arguing about how to survive your mistakes that you can listen to at once. You wander back to the engine room, trace the odd-looking bits of fused metal in the side that used to be you, that they couldn't cut out without compromising the engines and </span>
  <em>
    <span>really</span>
  </em>
  <span> making all of this have been for nothing, and think about what a fragging liar you are.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You promised your crew a chance to see the universe without fear or violence. You promised Drift you wouldn't die on him. And now you have to live with that.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Ha. Live. Funny.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>Stupid of you, to keep following Drift around after that. But you do. When Drift goes to meditate with his Great Sword, you follow. When Drift uses his clearance as SIC to force everyone out of the training room so he can viciously hack things into pieces without anyone judging him, you follow. It feels like the least you can do.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You don't </span>
  <em>
    <span>regret</span>
  </em>
  <span> dying to save the crew. It's how you've always wanted to go, right? Something stupid and dramatic and heroic. But you sort of figured that if you were still around to have any feelings about it afterward, you'd be… proud of yourself, maybe. Satisfied with a job well done.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You watch Drift break down and just feel cold.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You're not sure if it's the clarity of being dead or the </span>
  <em>
    <span>apathy</span>
  </em>
  <span> of being dead that makes it easier than you expect to sit down with Drift while he meditates. (That's a lie. Being dead has clarified exactly </span>
  <em>
    <span>squat</span>
  </em>
  <span> and you know it.) If you were alive and here, you'd be asking him a million questions and he would probably be answering each one as obligingly as he could before you got bored and jumped ahead to the next one. As it is, though, Drift meditates silently, and you have to guess at what you're supposed to be thinking as you mimic his posture.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Your fans don't run anymore unless you're consciously focusing on it. They run a lot when you're fake-meditating with Drift, trying to copy the even cycling of vents that you've learned by now </span>
  <em>
    <span>really</span>
  </em>
  <span> isn't a reflection of inner peace. More like the restraining bolt on a whole lot of </span>
  <em>
    <span>everything.</span>
  </em>
  <span> Sometimes you'll be sitting there together, meditating and fake-meditating, and Drift will scowl and roll to his feet and scatter anything unlucky enough to be in his way. He's broken furniture, shattered crystals, left fist-shaped dents in every wall of his hab, and you just </span>
  <em>
    <span>sit</span>
  </em>
  <span> there.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Being dead is cold and quiet and still, and it feels so unlike you you're certain something must have gone wrong somewhere. You'd like to move on now, thanks.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Please.</span>
</p>
<hr/>
<p>
  <span>Today, Drift takes the sword off his back as he sits down. He lays it out across his lap, resting it in his hands, and you sit down facing him with your own hands turned up like you're holding a matching one.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His lips move silently. Like always, you look away. It's fragged up, that you're fine watching him tear himself to pieces but the moment he starts praying you feel like some kind of voyeur. Especially since most of the time, he's praying about </span>
  <em>
    <span>you.</span>
  </em>
  <span> There's no way you're </span>
  <em>
    <span>supposed</span>
  </em>
  <span> to be here, witnessing all of this.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Maybe you are. Maybe this is it, and this is all there is. Maybe there have been ghosts surrounding everyone this whole time, and it's just that they're all avoiding you.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You duck your head and the next cycle of your fans is harsh and shuddering.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>"Sorry," you say, not sure if it's to Drift or to any fellow ghosts who might be listening. "I shouldn't have—I'm sorry."</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>No one pokes a head through the wall to forgive you or curse you out, which is probably for the best. It's stupid, but—quiet moments like these, where you can pretend things aren't the way they are, they matter more to you now than you ever could have imagined. You'll keep as many of them as you can.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Drift shifts a little as he finishes his prayer, and you take it as your cue to look back to his face. Sometimes, right about now, you'd give in to the impulse to reach out, try to smooth away the tense lines on his face. You don't this time. It feels too much like a violation.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You match his posture and the pace of his vents. You're not sure if it's about reaching and maintaining a certain, level-headed temperature, or if it's more about the rhythm, the steady whirr of fans and rush of air over one set of components, then another, then the first again. You're never quite sure how long the two of you stay like this—your chronometer runs strangely, these days, like it's keeping time by something else, and you don't exactly have fuel levels to keep track of anymore, and the one time you tried to run a defrag cycle to clear your head you lost a week and a half—but sometimes you count as Drift breathes, </span>
  <em>
    <span>one</span>
  </em>
  <span> for his processor, </span>
  <em>
    <span>two</span>
  </em>
  <span> for his engine, </span>
  <em>
    <span>three</span>
  </em>
  <span> for his processor, over and over.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Today you get to three hundred before Drift groans and drops his head, gripping the sword tightly at the crossguard with one hand while the other one twitches like he's forcing himself not to clamp down on the blade. You reach out and lay your hands over his in some pointless attempt at comfort before you can think not to, careful not to pass through him even as you approximate contact as closely as you can. "Hey, come on, don't—"</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Whatever you were about to say dies in your throat as Drift startles and onlines his optics.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He's not staring through you, but </span>
  <em>
    <span>at</span>
  </em>
  <span> you, and the gem under your hand is warmer than anything you've felt since you died. </span>
  <em>
    <span>"Rodimus?"</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>"Oh,"</span>
  </em>
  <span> you breathe.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>("If you think <em>being killed</em> is gonna slow me down, then you've <em>seriously</em> misread my character.")</p></blockquote><div class="children module" id="children">
  <b class="heading">Works inspired by this one:</b>
  <ul>
    <li>
        <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27920683">i can see the end</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stairre/pseuds/Stairre">Stairre</a>
    </li>
  </ul>
</div></div></div>
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